Software Freedom Day 2020 - Sep 19, 2020
Since that time it has grown in vulgarity and while organisers anticipated more than 1,000 teams in 2010 the event has stalled at around 400+ locations over the past two years, representing a 30% decrease over 2009. Since 2006 Software Freedom Day has been held on the third Saturday of September, it has occasionally coincided with International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
The free and obvious source software (FOSS) enthusiasts just celebrated the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 all across the world. This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The group consisted of unprotected source contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map, and users of FOSS solutions. Each participating cleave their own stories of how they got connected with FOSS and what component it behave in their day-to-day life. From how a father has been afflictive to introduce circularly open source to his young son while migrating from proprietary to uncovered source back and forth as his job demands so, to an Open Street Map contributor who truly believes that large-scale contributions to artless source can become the software as robust as proprietary ones and even better because of the freedom that lies in it. All of those who gathered harmonize with the fact that FOSS has widened their freedom in choosing how they want to use, share and remix the software they use. When Software Freedom Day was started in 2004, only 12 teams from different places joined. It grew to a whopping 1000 by 2010 across the world. About the aim of the celebration, SFD’s official website temper, “Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the advantage of using high-quality FOSS in education, in government, at dwelling, and in matter — in short, everywhere! The non-advantage organization Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the circle organize the local SFD events to impact their communities.” The participants in our group bounced both technical and philosophical questions to each other to gauge the actual usage of FOSS in real life, and we are moving towards adopting open-mindedness as a society. And all the participants also agreed that there is a significant disjoint in communicating widely about the work that many Indian FOSS and other free knowledge communities are doing.
So they design to intercept more regularly in events organized by any of the FOSS communities and try to connect with more people using social media and gossip groups so that these interactions shape into an annual event to bring all open communities under one roof. What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS? Free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both Free software and open source software. Adopted by well-known software openness advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, the free software has many fame — libre software, freedom-respecting software, and software libre are some of them. As determine by the Free Software Foundation, one of the early advocates of software freedom, free software allows users not just to use the software with complete freedom, but to study, modify, and allot the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and no-commercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and non-shoppy way, however, depends on the circumstantial license the software is released under. Similarly, there are several different open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “Open Source” was coined as an alternate to free software in 1998 by educational advocacy organization Open Source Initiative. Open source software is created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Supported by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the idealism that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who argues that free software is all throughout the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the leave to users from unjust power. SFD embolden everyone to contract in their own cities (map of places where SFD was organized this year), educate people around them near familiar software, promote on social media (with the hashtag #SFD2020 this year), even cut with free software, organizing hackathons, cursive free software setting up camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running ingenuous software! From South Asia, there were 13 celebratory events in India, 8 in Nepal, 1 in Bangladesh and 4 in Sri Lanka.
South Asian countries have seen the adoption of both free software and open fountain software, in both individual and organizational level and by the government. The Free Software Movement of India was based in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India.
